It’s official.  It HAS been a wonderful year for butterfies.  Day after day of sunny weather brought out the butterflies to gorge themselves on the buddleia in my garden. I remember there being lots of butterflies when I was a boy, but recently there just don’t seem to have been so many about.   And that was certainly my impression earlier this year [See Flower Portraits] But eve;rything has changed!

The annual survey carried out by the the charity Butterfly Conservation has confirmed my casual observations – the numbers in Scotland up by nearly two thirds on 2012.  The official result for Scotland lists the small tortoiseshell as the most common followed by the small white.  That is certainly true for Hatton.

Getting up close with my camera to these delightful little creatures has been quite easy.  And taking photographs has made me look much more closely at them than I had done before.   My star posers are the tortoiseshells who spread out their wings as they feed.  The small whites are much more coy, closing their wings as they land on a flower – not such a pleasing subject to photograph.

 

 

One exotic in my garden, or so one of my neighbours thought, is a huge blue butterly.  He could see it fluttering on the white cosmos blooms near my front door, a most unusual and unexpected butterfly for Cruden Country.   But I had to let him into a secret….it is solar powered and its fluttering is all the result of a little wire and an electric motor.

The arrival of the butterflies made me do some research to try to identify the species.    I discovered that for 60 years I have been calling the tortoiseshells “Red Admirals”, never thinking to check.  However I did manage to photograph a true Red Admiral when I was spendning a few days in Angelsey this summer.  Again the lucious buddleia, a true butterfly friendly plant, drew him in and click went my camera.